Amazon Drops Unlimited Cloud Storage for Individuals

This week, Amazon revealed that it will no longer offer an unlimited storage plan in its Amazon Drive consumer service. Instead, the firm will price cloud storage at $60 per 1 TB.

Amazon first announced unlimited cloud storage for individuals back in early 2015. At the time, I noted how this service compared to OneDrive, Google Drive, Apple iCloud, and Dropbox, and determined that Microsoft’s offering was still superior. But Amazon was offering what it called “infinite” storage for photos, videos, files, documents, movies, and music for just $60 per year. (If you wanted just infinite photo storage, the cost was $12 per year.)

No more.

Now, Amazon is offering storage plans of 100 GB ($20 per year) and 1 TB ($60 per year), and anyone who wants additional storage can pay another $60 per 1 TB. Additionally, all Amazon customers get 5 GB of free storage. And if you’re an Amazon Prime member, you get unlimited photo storage. (Which makes this service a good option for those who wisely choose to backup their phone-based photos to multiple places.)

The change is effective today, Amazon says, and customers who are already paying for unlimited storage will retain that perk until their current subscription expires. At that time, they will be switched to a 1 TB plan at $60 unless auto-renew is disabled.

If you are an Amazon Drive user, you should visit your Manage Storage page to see how much storage you’re currently using. (I was surprised to see that I am using over 38 GB of storage, mostly for music.) You can change plans now, turn-off auto-renew, or download your content (with the Amazon Drive desktop app for Windows).

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Just curious: do they notify their customers by email with an explicit statement of extremely increased fee or do they try to rip off every naive user not reading the complete update of the fine print? (The latter would be penalized by courts under German law according to several laws, so I am not surprised that German customers are treated differently.)

Carbonite's main problem for me was it was slow and had file size limitations. So large videos never got uploaded unless I went in and manually forced them. None of those problems with CrashPlan. In reply to Daekar:

Well, lasted longer than OneDrive Unlimited. But shows that you really can't trust any of the cloud plans and/or providers. They change the plan as they wish, and you can only cancel your sub if you don't like it. Which sucks, if you had let's say a 5TB backup of photos & videos, you lose it all, and having backup of 1/5th of your data makes no sense, while for 5x60$ I can buy few HDDs each year. So - wasted. Wasted money spent for earlier months/years, wasted bandwidth spent on uploading data that will now be deleted, wasted time on uploading and managing the data, etc

Actually, I forgot that they even had a storage service lol. It was a tip on Windows Weekly 2-3 years ago to get 50gigs of free space. I seem to have signed up for it, and never once used it. But now I got an email saying you can no longer add files after June 4th, and they will be shutting down servers on Aug 3rd... which also happens to be my birthday... thanks for the gift AT&T lol

If you're a business, you can get unlimited storage for $10/mth via G Suite Business with custom domain email (Gmail for business) if you sign up more than 5 users. Otherwise it's 1TB per user. Of course, Google Apps for Work is included without ads too.

I had recently signed up for amazon drive just to have a place to store all of the video projects I was working on, when I saw this news I went an canceled my subscription immediately. I have zero need for it now I already use Google Drive and OneDrive.

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The jokes on them mine does not expire until November 28th! Just in time for some 10TB Black Friday hard drive sales for the Unraid Server! SRL look into Unraid as it has been rock solid for me. I like that it allows several drives to be backed up using either a single parity drive or now two if you want to be extra safe.

I spent so much time and money migrating my data to Amazon that I am just sick over this. I guess its time to build a home storage server if I can figure out how to do it relatively affordably. I am not even a huge user, I need roughly 10TB of storage for the data I have now and am accumulating data at a rate of about 2-3TB a year for the foreseeable future. Consumer cloud storage just is not scaling with the growth in data produced by consumers.

I think "unlimited cloud storage" will become a thing of the past for any reputable service because they realize that too much money is being left on the table. 99.9% of us never even come CLOSE to using a full TB of space, let alone ever go over that. However, it's a nice psychological perk to see that "unlimited" tag next to your service subscription.